For example in Python the claim is that there's almost always only one way to do something, which either means ugly hacks are not possible, or else there's a lack of imagination amongst the programmers.

You're not being fair to Python.

Python's specific mantra (as listed in PEP 20) is: There should be one -- and preferably only one-- obvious way to do it. Emphasis mine.

Python, like any codebase, has a whole spectrum of "clean code" to "ugly hacks", but the richness of the language (and various libraries), provide a much richer foundation to let you avoid those ugly hacks.

(Unlike Perl, where the richness of the language somehow seems to encourage ugly hacks ^_-)

LEGO faced a decision whether they would keep their mediocre sales figures

Actually, LEGO faced a decision whether they would go bankrupt or do tie-ins. The BI BI linked in another comment is excellent in showing what happened to Lego and their comeback.

All the crying about crappy tie-in Lego sets is hysterical hand-wringing. Yes, those occupy the majority of retail store shelf-space, but that only reflects the reteail store's decision. The key thing is that those tie-ins have not replaced other "pure" Lego sets in Lego's catalog. It's 2015, search online: there are many onlineshops and alternatives. Even better, there's Brickset, an amazing database of sets, which not only will show you the wide variety of still-in-production sets but also useful tools to help you find the cheapest set for cost-per-brick.

Actually, while they indeed compared two computers on the same LAN, they also included a computer on the internet. Furthermore, One of Dropbox's touted features is that it's able to detect and use peers on a LAN to avoid the unneecssary round trip through the cloud. I don't know about Google Drive, but judging by the results I suspect they can do the same.

And, more importantly, they compared the other clients on the same setup.

I used the SEO-deoptimized Awesome window manager. It is a tiling window-manager in the tradition of XMonad and Ion.

Since I started using it, I discovered how moronic is the concept of traditional window manager that allows overlapping windows: Either I want an app displayed, or I don't, and I certainly want an app to use as much screen space available automatically. I understand though that the traditional windowing approach is simpler to understand and see its point for the plebes;)

I love its concept of "tags" instead of desktops, which gives me a powerful interface to mix and match which windows I want to display. I like that its "configuration" is actually a Lua program that allows me to precisely control how it behaves. I love that I can control it entirely through the keyboard. But I hate its stupid default keybindings: what's wrong with alt-tab nowadays?

Being a good teacher requires a particular set of skills I'm not sure Linus has, such as talking nice to idiots. (I kid! Treating (by definition ignorant) students like idiots is a fatal mistake). But seriously, being an expert in a field doesn't make you a good teacher, see: almost any college professor..

While this course will definitely get some name-brand recognition, I doubt it'll be better than a myriad other courses that exist already.

Posted
by
timothyon Thursday June 06, 2013 @04:14PM
from the we-think-we-can-save-the-foot dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Gallagher, Security Software Engineer at Red Hat, has completed his week-long experiment running GNOME 3 Classic. Stephen writes: 'While I was never as much in love with GNOME 2 as I was with KDE 3, I found it to be a good fit for my workflow. It was clean and largely uncluttered and generally got out of my way. Now that Fedora 19 is in beta and GNOME Classic mode is basically ready, I decided that it was my duty to the open-source community to explore this new variant, give it a complete investigation and document my experiences each day.' I'll leave Stephen's opinion on the new Classic Mode to the Slashdot reader to discover, but I will say that it does touch on the much debated GNOME Shell Activities Overview, and the gnome-2-like Classic mode's Windows List on the taskbar."

I concur on Janet Asimov's books. I actually read those in 7th or 8th grade, after I had read many of Isaac Asimov's other books. I was just looking for anything with "Asimov" on it. I recall finding them a bit juvenile, but still a good enough read that I still remember them 20 years later!

I've long been a KDE user, switched to it in the KDE 4.1 days and never understood why people were so unhappy about it. I found it to be slick and useful, despite the regular problems with the NetworkManager applet in Debian Unstable. I just used the Gnome applet instead, which fit without a hitch.

Last year, finally frustrated enough with juggling between the windows of my various terminals and editors, I chose to give a tiling window manager a good try, and spent some effort on the ill-named Awesome (seriously, how do you SEO that?).

Though it's certainly not aimed at Joe Six-Pack in that you actually have to edit the Lua-based config file to configure it yourself, I found it extremely powerful and perfectly suited to my needs. The "tag" system to organize your window is supreme in allowing me precise control over which windows to display.

I discovered that I didn't have a use for all the frills of Gnome and KDE, except for USB-key and Wifi network management which are both accessible from the CLI anyhow (see udisks and nmcli).... does this mean I've turned into a greybeard?